Nick Mathiason, journalist and resident of Clapton for 16 years

The East End might not be united in enthusiasm for the imminent sport and business fest. And those who can are clearing out for the duration. But there will be no escape. The Olympics will still be there when they get back because it will leave behind amazing infrastructure that will be an asset to their community for years to come.

The Games has given the East End a complete new train line and one major line upgrade, a light railway line extension plus a repulsive yet useful Westfield shopping mall.

And, oh, I nearly forgot. There's the sport. And for all – not just the elite. On our doorstep will be fantastic Olympic facilities that if managed correctly will be the catalyst for future East End achievement and fulfilment. Unlike most Games in other cities, hundreds of thousands of people actually live where new facilities are located. You can almost feel the pent-up determination to use them.

Our appetite has been whetted by the seven-year run-up to the Games, which has seen an injection of money into school and community sport. My kids get steeply discounted basketball, BMX and swimming coaching. They have the opportunity to play sport with disabled kids, which they seize with relish.The worry is the funding will be switched off once the caravan has passed through. We need to shame the purse string holders to continue what they started. But that's for another day. We are incredibly lucky to have the Games in our manor.

Anna Minton, author of Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century

I agree the new transport connections brought about indirectly by the Games are great for Stratford. But I feel the way the development of the area has been handled is not only all wrong but deeply anachronistic. The Olympic Park to date is a new "quarter" of London built on an outdated Docklands model. The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is not a royal park and the new places within it are not public. Instead they are privately owned and privately controlled. So, the Olympic Village, the first neighbourhood to be completed, has been sold off to a consortium led by the Qatari royal family.

There are many problems with this, not least the fact that the taxpayer foots the bill. This is a model of development based on very large amounts of debt, borrowed on the premise of ever increasing property values. But with the financial crisis the model collapsed, with the private sector unable to borrow the money. At the same time as we bailed out the banks we also bailed out the Olympics to the tune of an extra £5.7bn. According to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, the private sector has only contributed 2% of a budget that now tops £10bn. All over the UK this model of development has stalled, leaving construction sites empty, because this is a model that doesn't add up any more, unless we, the taxpayer, pay for it.

I'm glad your kids are enthused by the sport and I hope they enjoy the Games. I just think it's such a missed opportunity that the development has followed a model stuck in the past.

NM It was the International Olympic Committee's assessment that transport was a weak link within the original London bid. This forced the government to accelerate its investment in new lines. They have indisputably opened up huge tracts of previously hard-to-reach areas of the East End, plugging them into the London network and beyond. It is an utter boon. And without the Games, they would likely still lie on the drawing board. The economic downturn would have seen to that.

Sure, the Olympic Park – I refuse to call it Queen Elizabeth's – will be privately owned. How else are we meant to pay for this? So far 75% of the cost of building the Olympic village has been recouped in deals, not just with the Qataris but with housing associations too. Is that bad?

The thing about the Olympics is that you have effectively got six years to build them. So the state has to get involved. I like the idea of a big vision by a courageous state transforming a largely poisoned, redundant, post-industrial 500-acre wasteland with amazing facilities.

I think what is now important is to focus on ensuring that the Olympic Park brings education and employment opportunities for local people to bring down horrendous rates of unemployment and drive up achievement levels.

AM There is no disagreement between us when it comes to the improvement of transport links. What I'm concerned about is that the model of development pursued, based on "trickledown" economics, is precisely one that does not bring opportunities to local people. We know, from Docklands and the Isle Of Dogs a generation ago, that wealth does not trickle down to the poorest places that need it the most.

Affordable housing has been at the centre of legacy promises and indeed we are told that half the homes in the Olympic village will be affordable. The Olympic boroughs are among the poorest in the country and affordable housing is desperately needed. Yet now the definition of affordable housing has been changed to mean up to 80% of market rent and that is not affordable at all to the vast majority of local people.

Before London won the bid, an ethical Olympics agreement was signed by the former mayor and the Olympic bidding committee, which included pledges on local jobs, training and affordable housing. But when the Olympic Delivery Authority took over after London won the bid, they refused to honour the agreement, claiming that "it is illegal to dictate the terms of contracts struck under open tender". So much for the Olympic spirit.

NM True, employment opportunities from the Olympics have not lived up to the hype so far. Just 25% of contractors during the build phase lived in the Olympic boroughs, according to the Olympic Delivery Authority. But 35% of the eventual 11,000 units to be built on the Olympic Park will be affordable. That is substantial, even though moving the "affordable" goalposts is definitely not good.

If the Olympic Park creates another bankers' ghetto like Canary Wharf, it will have utterly failed. But I do not think it will end up like that. For one thing, unlike the Wharf, this is a public-facing project. And the fact that sport facilities are involved changes the dynamic.

What will be crucial is the eventual use of the Media Centre. The tenant selected for this will be pivotal in determining the employment nature of the park. But in a broader sense the Olympics has put the East End on the world map. The challenge is to ensure it's sustained. That things such as community sport, which has progressed, remain funded. Otherwise the Games will be just for show.

AM I think it's very unlikely that 11,000 homes will be built in the Olympic Park. I think there is now an opportunity for the Olympic legacy to be handled very differently from what has gone so far. Daniel Moylan, the new chair of the Mayoral Development Corporation, which takes over from the Olympic Park Legacy Company, has said that he wants a clean break from the old Docklands model, which he described as a "fortress". Instead he has said that he wants the streets and public places under his remit – which spans an area considerably larger than the park – to be genuinely public. Of course, it's too late for the Olympic village but excepting that, this indication of a desire to do things differently could result in what you describe as a "public-facing" project and what I would call development that is genuinely in the public interest for the rest of the park. The problem is there isn't going to be any money. But as far as I'm concerned a willingness to break with what has gone before is at least a start.